February 12 - April 11, 2026
everything was once something else is a solo exhibition by the 2025-26 Wanlass Artist in Residence Roksana Pirouzmand, an Iranian multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in Los Angeles. This exhibition considers Pirouzmand’s ongoing inquiry into transformation, interconnectedness, and impermanence. Working with clay and metal, materials born of the earth and shaped by fire, Pirouzmand explores their contrasting qualities: one absorbent and porous, the other resonant and reverberant. Across her practice, matter becomes a conduit for thinking about cause and effect, fragility and force, and the ways energy moves between bodies, materials, and environments.
Presented across two sites, OXY ARTS and JOAN, with staggered openings, the exhibition features a series of new sculptural works linked through vibration and sound. Subtle movements—often imperceptible at first—activate chains of resonance that travel from one object to another, animating the invisible kineticism of the space and extending across sites, as sounds originating at OXY ARTS are registered at JOAN. Visitors at OXY ARTS will navigate a gallery floor embedded with a vibrational surface holding a series of sculptural works. Surface movements will activate subtle vibrations that travel from the floor to the sculptures. These vibrations transfer as sound waves to sculptures at JOAN, activating, and in some cases gradually eroding, the clay sculptures there. Like a pebble dropped into water, a single action generates expanding ripples that gradually disperse and merge into a larger field. Sound waves echo water waves; motion in one room is felt in another, registering on the skin as much as in the ear.
Additional works explore Pirouzmand’s interest in the embodied form, where gestures—hands tapping, surfaces touching—become sites of transmission. Here, energy moves from audience to sculpture, from sculpture to sound, and onward to other forms of matter, bringing into relief a shared condition of entanglement in which even the smallest action carries the potential to reverberate across time and space.
This exhibition and related programming are made possible by generous support from the Kathryn Caine Wanlass Charitable Foundation.
